Beyond Death’s Dream Kingdom: modernity and the psychoanalytic Social Imaginary

Abstract

The appearance on the historical stage of Western modernity is often understood as an “epochal event” that overturned an earlier pre-modern cultural condition that was premised on the dialectic of life and death and the attempt to forge a suitable balance or harmony between them. As such Western modernity is often viewed as the emergence as a new liberal political order based upon individualism, radical immanence and the emergence of a new calculating subjectivities and governmentalities in ways that led to the rejection of the transcendent, the metaphysical and the theological dimensions of human life. In this paper, using Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors as a point of reference and adopting the oblique position in relation to the modern taken up by the artist in this painting, I suggest that in the 20th Century, largely as a result of an awareness of the metaphysical significance of the catastrophe of the First World War, that modern liberalism was thrown into crisis and the old pre-modern metaphysical problematic returned as new focus of social and political concern. With specific reference to the work of Sigmund Freud and later psychoanalytic thinkers who took Freud’s idea of the death drive as their theoretical point of departure, I show how in the 20th century psychoanalytically-informed practitioners attempted to resolve the ancient conflict between the forces of life and death through the creation of an enchanted phantasmagoria of mass consumable objects that were often specifically designed and marketed in order to eroticise the nascent thanatic dimensions of modern life, thereby rendering the latter manageable and ultimately liveable. Drawing on the work of social theorists of the imaginary such as Glibert Durand as well as famous propagandisers of Freud such as Edward Bernays and Ernst Dichter (who saw in Freud’s work the possibility of developing a political technology) I will suggest that in the 20th century the consumer object was central to the construction of a psychoanalytic social imaginary geared towards the maintenance and management of economic demand in Fordist disciplinary societies. Using the humble cigarette as a case study I show how familiar objects were redesigned via psychoanalytic conceptions in order to harness to the power of death for social useful ends. By way of conclusion I will suggest reasons why this social imaginary is currently in the process of being replaced (in contemporary neo-liberalism).